By February 20, 2009, the world will be rocked as Russian special forces, wearing Gazprom (OTC:OGZPY) security uniforms, will invade Ukraine to protect the natural gas pipeline into Europe. Russian stocks will plummet as skittish investors flee Moscow for good. But three companies stand to make a mint.

Goldman Sachs has groomed politicians, more than one treasury secretary, and more than a few millionaires. But the history of the 139-year-old Wall Street giant has long been shrouded by "a near fetish for no publicity".

~ SNIP ~

He said: “We as a world society need a new financial system. “The problem is that we need an international system and there are only national governments."

It's more than twice as old as the Pyramids, or even the written word. When it was built, saber-toothed tigers and woolly mammoths still roamed, and the Ice Age had just ended. The elaborate temple at Gobelki Tepe in southeastern Turkey, near the Syrian border, is staggeringly ancient: 11,500 years old, from a time just before humans learned to farm grains and domesticate animals.

According to the German archaeologist in charge of excavations at the site, it might be the birthplace of agriculture, of organized religion — of civilization itself. "This is the first human-built holy place," Klaus Schmidt of the German Archaeological Institute says in the November issue of Smithsonian magazine.

"Shariah-compliant banking, sometimes called Islamic banking, is growing in popularity in the Western and Islamic worlds. But critics say American interest in the system at a time of economic crisis is opening the door to increased Islamic influence in the American banking system. Worse yet, some fear the banks may be helping to finance international terrorism.

In Shariah-compliant banking, lenders may not charge interest and investors cannot make money from forbidden industries like gambling, alcohol, pork and pornography. Selling debt, devising derivatives and short selling are also prohibited, and investments must be closely tied to actual assets.In the U.S., the Dow Jones Islamic Index tracks Shariah-compliant companies and funds, and funds have sprung up like the Amana Mutual Funds Trust and the Azzad Asset Management.

American investment funds, like those offered by TD Ameritrade and Charles Schwab, can invest in Shariah-compliant companies, and those companies can offer investments in American companies. Top holdings in the Azzad Ethical Midcap Fund, for example, include Western Digital Corp., Southwest Electric Co. and Apple Computer, Inc.

But allowing Shariah-compliant finance in the U.S. is green-lighting a seditious system that supports jihad, said Frank Gaffney, founder and president of the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C.

"If you understand what Shariah is, you understand that it is a pretty awful system. Not something that you'd want insinuated in your society and becoming a major feature of your economic system," Gaffney said.

"Shariah (Islamic law as dictated by the Koran) governs all aspects of life, from the personal practice of the faith to how you relate to your family to how you relate to your business partners, to your community .... all the way up to how the world is run, and it is all one seamless program. You can't say 'I'll take the personal pietistic practice ... and skip the beheading and the flogging and the stoning and the global theocracy,'" he said."

I fully expect an Obama administration and a liberal Congress will be very receptive to sharia banking. Then it will be come very easy for terrorists to operate at will within our borders because they will have easy access to financing to do so. Given our free society, someone with $50,000 in cash can operate almost invisibly for quite a long time and cause untold damage.

Buckle up folks, it's going to be a bumpy ride.

Personally, I set the over/under for the next terrorist attack on U.S. soil to happen within 6 months of Obama taking office. I then put it at one chance in three that Obama will do anything but apologize.

Blake's Heaven: A man ahead of his time During his lifetime, he was dismissed by many as a dangerous radical. But now, on the 250th anniversary of his birth, he is hailed as one of Britain's greatest visionaries

It is a distinct honour for me to participate in this High-level meeting of the United Nations General Assembly under the agenda item 'Culture of Peace', sponsored by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and a host of member States.

There, for the correct number of euros, lecherous old men get to spend the night in bed with nude young women. But this is no ordinary prostitution racket. First, the women have willingly been drugged, so they sleep through the entire experience and remember nothing when they awaken.

Second, there is no sex except for a little caressing and an occasional kiss. Edmond's encounters in this necrophiliac brothel awaken bizarre hallucinations about his mother and other childhood events. The story takes on an air of suspense when Edmond accidentally sees a corpse being carried from the building and taken away in a car.

"House of the Sleeping Beauties" is rewarding viewing for people with the correct mind-set. Just don't confuse it with the Disney animation classic "Sleeping Beauty" and bring the kids.

‘God is dead,” Friedrich Nietzsche declared in Thus Spake Zarathustra and The Gay Science, two of his nineteenth-century assaults upon the established moral order.

“God is not great,” Christopher Hitchens decrees in his tome of the same title released last year.

“Stop!” Herb London shouts, as he stands athwart history in his new book, America’s Secular Challenge: The Rise of a New National Religion, published this autumn by Encounter Books. In it, he takes on the high priests and acolytes of radical secularism, which he deems to be an emerging national faith. Such an ideology elevated to the level of religious doctrine poses a grave threat to the West, London, the president of the Hudson Institute, properly asserts. This is true of extreme secularism in and of itself, but even more so when it is juxtaposed against the designs of one of our mortal enemies, militant Islamism.

“In particular, I hope to demonstrate,” he writes, “that our culture’s increasing commitment to the tenets of radical secularism undermines our resolve to oppose a fanatical foe on the world stage.” As he argues elsewhere, “[t]he question is whether radical secularism offers a sufficiently robust alternative to religion — robust enough, that is, to nurture our allegiance to the core values of Western civilization at a time when those values are under siege not only from the external threat of radical Islam, but also from the internal threats of spiritual fecklessness and moral anemia.” No, it does not, is his sobering reply, which makes his latest publication a must read.RADICAL SECULARISM

In his book, London differentiates between a healthy secularism and its extremist counterpart. The former is one of the pillars of enlightened liberal democracies. Many of its adherents are patriotic citizens of the West. “There are secularists who love America and will sacrifice for it,” he affirms. Radical secularism, however, “is a kind of faith, as is the dogmatic commitment to scientific rationality, to which so many secularists appeal in the hopes of answering moral and ontological questions that were once answered by religion.”

The rational secularist — someone like Alan Wolfe, Christopher Hitchens, or the staff of the American Civil Liberties Union — “disinters a ‘religious’ canon of his own, one that has a distinct value system even as it rejects Christianity and Judaism.” At first glance it may seem ironic to refer to radical secularism as a religion, since it is bereft of any faith in God, but the author is right to assert that it constitutes a new belief system, a postmodern creed of sorts, which is one of his key insights. Another is how he turns the tables on elitist commentators who are so quick to excoriate religious fundamentalists by applying their standards to radical secularists, demonstrating in the process how it is the latter group that more often exhibits intellectual rigidity.

London identifies five developments in our time that have paved the way for the ascendancy of radical secularism. They include the rise of multiculturalism; the decay of traditional religion; the degeneration of the liberal virtue of tolerance into an unwillingness to discriminate (relativism, in other words); transnationalism, which is “the effort to reduce or eliminate the national heritage of European states through continental harmonization” — and a phenomenon creeping into American life; and “a loss of existential confidence that is at the same time a failure of nerve.” There is a historical dimension to this process, too, since the assault upon established religion has deep roots in the West, including Friedrich Nietzsche, as mentioned above, and extending back to the radical French branch of the Enlightenment, which the author acknowledges early on in his book.

While London details the contemporary secular campaign being waged against Judeo-Christian civilization writ large, he is eloquent in his defense of Christianity itself. “[T]he historical truth is that our way of life, including the liberty ensconced in liberalism, emerged from and is sustained from Christian principles,” he argues. “Judeo-Christian principles” might be the more accurate phrase, this reviewer believes, but the author’s effort to bolster a Christianity now unsure of itself is most welcome. He welcomes Pope Benedict’s appeal to reason, or logos, in his Regensberg address, revealing that his book is not, by any means, a simple-minded attack upon modern science. “Pope Benedict’s lecture at Regensberg University was, in fact, an exploration of faith’s basis in reason.” He recounts in a positive manner the Pope’s recent remarks to a youth audience. “The great challenge of our time is secularism,” the Pontiff said. “Society creates the illusion that God does not exist, or that God can be restricted to the realm of purely private affairs. Christians cannot accept that attitude. This is the first necessity: that God becomes newly present in our lives.”

In his concluding chapter London exhorts Christianity to rise to the occasion by appealing to its noblest achievements: “[w]hether Islam will find the will to reform itself is a looming question of our times, but it is equally important to ask whether Christendom, which has often wanted to sit out the battle, will mobilize the spiritual strength to fight for the greatest and most liberating tradition the world has yet known.”

Radical secularists seek to banish religion entirely from the public square. But what do they believe in private? In an important chapter London delineates their six central principles, what he calls the “articles of a possible secularist catechism.” Listen closely, and we can hear several of them reverberate in this presidential election season.

The first doctrine is that “[t]ruth is subjective, relative, or contextual.” Next is the assertion that [r]ationality can solve moral and ontological questions about man’s nature,” followed closely by the notion that a “rational government is freed from the limits traditionally imposed on its purview through the attainment of technical knowledge. Man’s eternal problems, including the plight of the poor, can be solved through a welfare state based on the redistribution of wealth.” The fourth article of faith holds that “[s]ince we are all children of the globe, subject to the same rationality, national loyalty and patriotism are dangerous anachronisms.” The fifth asserts that the “most important goal one can seek is self-transformation, what the psychologist Abraham Maslow called ‘self-actualization.” The last dogma stipulates that“[d]iscrimination is the great bugbear of social intercourse.

The mandate ‘judge not, let ye be judged,’ stripped of its original meaning as a plea for compassion, is not a justification for closing one’s eyes to the difference between right and wrong.” London’s assessment of these secular commandments is quite damning. “[L]et us say that, taken together, they form the basis for a seductive new religion. Since this religion is based upon individual, self-directed action as the source of salvation — and upon manifest disapproval of the transcendent — one might just as accurately describe it as a new form of paganism.”MILITANT ISLAM

The perpetrators of 9/11, alas, were not pagans, but adherents of militant Islamism. Radical secularism, London is right to stress, is incapable of confronting this deadly strategic threat. Since it eschews theology in favor of rationality, this paradigm cannot adequately comprehend a fanatical movement rooted in religion. As he laments, “[b]elieving that there must be a rational explanation for seemingly irrational behavior, Western leaders and opinion makers bend over backwards to contrive exculpatory explanations. Rarely do they come to the conclusion that the violence is fomented by religious zealotry no liberal concessions can possibly mitigate.” Many Western policymakers are handicapped by the limits of the secularist imagination, in other words.

Militant Muslims, for their part, perceive that the fissures now visible in the foundation of Western resolve — due in part to the corrosive effects of radical secularism — present opportunities they can exploit, cracks they can pry open. During a recent seminar on his book in New York City, London made a perceptive comment in reply to a question on what might be fueling the rise of extremist Islam at this historical juncture: “Perhaps it is because radical Islam recognizes a cultural weakness in the West,” he said. As he puts it in his book, “[c]ertainly part of the reason for the recent tumult is the belief circulating in the Islamic world that a secular West no longer has the will to resist Islamic jihad.”

Herb London is correct. At bottom, our social malaise is a spiritual illness. We are fighting now on battlefields in Afghanistan and Iraq, but, as he warns, “if the West cannot marshal the strength to defend its core values, these contemporary Crusades will assuredly end in disaster. Part — a large part — of that task is spiritual. It involves challenging the gospel of radical secularism, according to which the goal of human life is entirely defined by material well-being.” In its place can stand a revival of the Judeo-Christian founding principles of the West in general and the United States in particular. Religion remains a vital force in American life and represents a wellspring of national renewal. Tapping into it can help to ensure the more favorable outcome of the two scenarios that, London believes, lie ahead of us.

“As the first decade of the twenty-first century comes to a close, its seems clear that there will either be a rebirth of the West, bolstered by a resuscitation of its key traditions, or further disintegration as we struggle ineptly against fanaticism.” The obstacles to achieving the first outcome are formidable, to be sure, but America’s Secular Challenge: The Rise of a New National Religion outlines a strategy for ultimate success.

— Joseph Morrison Skelly is a college history professor in New York City and a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

STUCK MOJOOpen Season

I speak peace when peace is spoken But I speak war when your hate is provoking The season is open 24-7-365 Man up yo ~ time to ride No need to hide behind slogans of deceit Claiming that you're a religion of peace We just don't believe you We can clearly see through The madness that you're feeding your people Jihad! The cry of your unholy war Using the willing, the weak and poor From birth drowning in propaganda rhetoric and slander All we can say is damn ya My forefathers fought and died for this here I'm stronger than your war of fear Are we clear? If you step in my hood It's understood It's open season

I'm too terrified to walk out of my own front door,They're demonstrating outsideI think they're gonna start the third world war,I've been to my local head shrinker,To help classify my disease,He said it's one of the cases of acute schizophrenia he sees.

Well the milkman's a spy, and the grocer keeps on following me,And the woman next door's an undercover for the K.G.B.,And the man from the Social SecurityKeeps on invading my privacy,Oh there ain't no cure for acute schizophrenia disease.

I'm lost on the river, the river of no return,I can't make decisions, I don't know which way I'm gonna turn,Even my old dad, lost some of the best friends he ever had,Apparently, his was a case of acute schizophrenia too.

They're watching my house and they're tapping my telephone,I don't trust nobody, but I'm too scared to be on my ownAnd the income tax collector's got his beady eye on me,No there ain't no cure for acute schizophrenia disease.

Some time ago a crazy dream came to me, I dreamt I was walkin' into World War Three, I went to the doctor the very next day To see what kinda words he could say. He said it was a bad dream. I wouldn't worry 'bout it none, though, They were my own dreamsand they're only in my head.

I said, "Hold it, Doc,a World War passed through my brain." He said, "Nurse, get your pad, this boy's insane," He grabbed my arm,I said "Ouch!" As I landed on the psychiatric couch, He said, "Tell me about it."

The Flying Camel

Arebel's Diary

BabbaZed Vinyl Cultessa 2012

BabbaZee Repenthouse Pet 1982

Should GOD reward you on your terms then, when you refuse to repent? You must decide, not I... So, tell me what you know... ~ Job 34:33

"You surrender in your own name. Leave me out of it. "

Obey & Endure

No matter how many times I explain to people that I understand that they feel lost and helpless and betrayed by their leaders in the face of the Jihad, that I understand deeply that these are the only people that you perceive to be "standing up to jihad" - no matter how much irrefutable information I give you that many of these so called anti jihadists are just as bad as the jihad itself - You will turn the blind eye out of expedience, out of fear, out of laziness, out of shallowness of moral character, out of stupidity, out of tribal affiliation, out of complacency, out of ignorance, out of vanity, out of hatred.... take your pick. In any event you will chose to stay blind. Let those who have eyes, see:

This Notta Blahhhg Has Been Approved By The Elderbunny Of Zion

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If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.

~ Leviticus 20:13

Next time someone tries to shove some Homo Stultus dogma down your throat it would please me very much if you would use the following links to express your disinterest in their Darwingelical Dawkins Da'Wa....